May 2021
Saturday, 22 May 2021
Predatory precarity
Steve Randy Waldman: “If you cut doctors’ salaries in half tomorrow, they would have to sell their mortgaged, absurdly expensive homes. At half their present salary, doctors would no longer be able to afford to live amongst ‘peer’ professions like lawyers, management consultants, middling corporate executives, and the employees of surveillance monopolists. Doctors would fall precipitously from the social class, embedded in geography and consumption habits, to which many of them even now cling only precariously. More calamitously, they would lose the capacity to produce or reproduce membership in that social class for their children, often the most expensive amenity American professionals seek to purchase.”
Wednesday, 19 May 2021
The Bombs That Never Went Off
David Frum: “Yet newsworthy or not, you have been living more safely these past three decades thanks to the Nunn-Lugar program—and thanks to the hard work of hundreds of career federal employees whose names you will never know.”
Friday, 14 May 2021
Tolerance is not a moral precept
Yonatan Zunger: “Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other’s throats. It means that we accept that people may be different from us, in their customs, in their behavior, in their dress, in their sex lives, and that if this doesn’t directly affect our lives, it is none of our business. But the model of a peace treaty differs from the model of a moral precept in one simple way: the protection of a peace treaty only extends to those willing to abide by its terms. It is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact.”
Wednesday, 5 May 2021
Herd Immunity Is Humanity’s Great Hope, and It’s Proving Elusive
Bloomberg: “…died down once they’d burned through a certain percentage of a herd, so long as new animals weren’t introduced.” … “Humans aren’t cows”
Sunday, 2 May 2021
Vaccinations are plateauing. Don’t blame it on ‘resistance’
STAT: “In fact, ‘having more information’ is the single most important concern expressed by those unsure about the Covid-19 vaccine, according to almost every poll that asks this question.”